Wednesday, December 30, 2009

That's a LOT of Ammo!

Owen noticed that DHS has a hunger for ammo.

The Department of Homeland Security has placed an order for 200 million rounds of pistol ammunition (.40 caliber, hollow-point) over the next five years for use by its Immigration, Customs and Enforcement division.

Let’s see now, ICE has approximately 15,000 employees. ...

That's about 2600 rounds/employee/year for the next 5 years, or about 220 rounds/month/employee. (But not all DHS employees tote sidearms.)

Which works out to about 2++ hours' target-practice per month per employee, unless they're saving those rounds for other purposes.

4 comments:

  1. Don't they use simulators for half of their practice sessions?

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  2. This could be a ploy to artificially inflate the cost of ammunition, making it harder to find and more expensive.

    The other obvious answer is that they are prepared to defend the US against home-grown terrorists... You know, white Christian, patriotic males.

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  3. Correction: "prepared" should be "preparing."

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